It is the winter of 1945 and a thin, cherub-faced boy of 10 or 11 in a ragged German military uniform is watching as the end of his part in World War II straggles past, a line of human misery. He has stolen food and fuel from the Nazis and will later rob the foxholes left behind by the advancing Americans. Small and dark - they called him The Black One - at age six he had become a favourite of the local commander of the Military Supply Depot in his hometown village in East Germany, his impish nature winning him special favours.
Throughout World War II, Wolf Blass' maternal grandfather and mother, Irmgard, had kept open the long-established family villa and the attached Otto Sohn bottling factory complex. Grandfather Otto Sohn, the most influential person in the life of the boy and later the man, had maintained the business and negotiated his way through the red tape of war, providing generous amounts of schnapps and wine to civil and military officials.
In later years, the boy would do the same in faraway Australia, where it was always known that "Wolfie" had a car filled with good wine for sharing. Here, instead of the German card game skaat that his grandfather played weekly with the powerbrokers of the town, Wolf would play football with passion, drive vintage cars and enjoy horseracing - all the perks of a young society that ultimately repaid him with wealth and public acknowledgment for his achievements in its once unknown wine industry.
Wolfgang Franz Otto Blass was born in 1934 - "a Virgo in a good vintage year" - into a wealthy, respected family in the village of Stadtilm in the Thuringia Mountains. His mother's father had the wine and spirit business and his father, Friedrich, was a doctor of law and economics. His mother's family lived in a large, luxurious villa at the edge of the village, beside the bottling factory and above the deep, cool wine cellars. The young, super-active boy led an idyllic life in a valley that is one of the most naturally blessed in Germany, with its rivers and lakes, steep mountains and dense, green forests.
He was five when war broke out in 1939 and far too young to be aware of the havoc it could wreak on his world, even though he must have realised the men of the household were gone, his uncles to the front and his father to an administrative position in Berlin. The years 1942-43 were good for the family business: Germany was winning the war and, though the men of Stadtilm had gone, French prisoners of war supplied sufficient labour to keep the plant running. Of course, the tide turned and by the winter of 1945 grandfather Otto Sohn was negotiating with the German soldiers planning a last stand at his factory gates in the path of the advancing Allies.
"They had the order to defend, but for some reason or another it wasn't done, and I think - when history declares all this - that my grandfather actually was responsible for the town of Stadtilm not being rolled over," recalls Wolf. "They had plans to blow up everything. They wanted to dig around our property, which was at the end of the town, to defend it if the tanks were rolling in. This would have seen a total demolition of the houses and factories and everything else. They were absolutely bloody stupid, because there were two mountains and Stadtilm was sitting in the middle. So they would have defended from one side and the Americans come in from the other. "
As the Allies drew nearer, young Wolf noticed more and more military officers and members of the local hierarchy visiting the family complex. "My grandfather had more parties and shows and all this type of thing. At the time I didn't really realise what was going on, what happened, but this was part of the softening of the local military attitude. My grandfather convinced them it would be useless to make a defence system. And here again I remember that the negotiations at the end of the war took place around my grandfather, that it must have been the schnapps, the brandy or cognac or whatever the thing was that convinced them to move the unit away."
Wolf did not come across death firsthand until the war's final days. He had seen and heard the bombs dropping, listened to and read the reports of the dead and dying. But with Friedrich working in Berlin and his uncles at the front, Wolf's grandfather, mother, aunts and cousins remained sheltered behind the walls of their complex. This early life - absent father, a mother consumed by the need to keep the business running and a grandfather forever networking and juggling competing interests to keep a large number of dependent women and children safe - was to have a profound, some would say even tragic, effect not only on his marriages but also on his own children years later in Australia.
Wolf's third wife, Shirley Nyberg-Blass, believes the inevitable tensions of this kind of childhood affected Wolf so much emotionally that he has never understood the concept of family, and in turn has never dealt well with emotional issues involving family members.
Perhaps he learned early that emotion was something to be traded on and taken advantage of. Next to the family bottling factory was the Military Supply Depot, where luxury items from occupied countries were stored - Wolf particularly remembers the chocolates from France, Italy and Belgium. He was such a favourite of the commander in charge of the stores that he even had a special military uniform made up for him to wear. "He took me as a mascot. He said I was a very nice bloke. And I had a German uniform they had made for me and, despite the fact that it was always guarded, the whole bloody place, you know, I could almost walk in and out. You have to look at it from the point of a child who likes to play Indians or play soldiers."
Friendly adults, a generous source of chocolate - any young boy, anywhere, would have been happy with this. But it was a grace-and-favour situation, not one of mutual respect and affection. The control was not in Wolf's hands and the power of his mentor was backed by the awesome authority of the military. This might be why, as an adult, Wolf has never willingly given up control of any part of his life, whether in business or marriage.
Nevertheless, when he moved to London in the 1950s, Wolf hid his identity, aware that the stain of Nazi Germany went with him. "Because of my age and nationality, English people had to be treated very carefully. People thought I was Rhodesian and I didn't deny it. But, you know, in Germany I was only a bloody boy, I mean, you have to look at this from a different bloody angle."
That journey to the top ended at the bottom of the world in Australia, but 60 years later Wolf was still dealing with the demons of his childhood. As an adult, he began returning to Germany regularly to attend a health farm. He also began to revisit scenes of his youth. As an adult, he read deeply about World War II and Germany's role in it. The scenes of the Death March he had watched as a child came back to him and the true story - not what he was told as a boy, that these people were criminals - suddenly became clear to him when he stood years later with Fritz in front of that memorial in Singen. "That's what I saw."
Turning 75 in 2009, Wolf talked about letting go of a few responsibilities. At the same time, he was preparing a schedule that would see him travelling almost constantly around the world for most of the year to celebrate the launch of his 75th Birthday Tribute Wines by Foster's, the global wine giant that saw a golden opportunity to own Australia's leading brand in 1996 and bought the company.
More importantly, Foster's recognised the value of the man himself as a living legend and retained him as an official ambassador to the world for Wolf Blass Wines.
But behind the loud bow ties that he has made his trademark in Australia, behind the self-proclamations of his greatness that became synonymous with his name, there is a different, less confident man. "If somebody asked me for one word to describe Wolf, I would say ‘fearful'," Shirley Nyberg-Blass says of her husband of 20 years. But fearful of what?
"Wolf would hate to be forgotten," Shirley says. "I think he feels he has to be noticed. He needs to be out there or people will forget about him. But, as much as he wants to be known, there are times that he really needs to get away from it because he doesn't want to talk. But then once you've got yourself out there it's a little bit hard to become a shrinking violet, isn't it?" WB